Richard Feynman – Great minds of our time

Richard Feynman (1918-1988) is turly one of the “Great minds of our time”. I have been reading many books by him and books about him for years now. I probably have 10 books written by him or about him on my shelf and borrowed a few others from libraries.

“No Ordinary Genius: The Illustrated Richard Feynman” by Christopher Sykes has a large collections of photos, some drawings by Dick, and stories from a long list of people that knew Dick really well. It is a book that I love and treasure. Christopher also produced the documentary I included at the end of this post.

“He drifted toward unconsciousness. His eyes dimmed. Speech became an exertion. Gweneth [Dick’s wife] watched as he drew himself together, prepared a phrase, and released it: “I’d hate to die twice. It’s so boring.” After that, he tried to communicate by shifting his head or squeezing the hand that clasped his. Shortly before midnight on February 15, 1988, his body gasped for air that the oxygen tube could not provide, and his space in the world closed. An imprint remained: what he knew, how he knew.”

I love “QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter” because it is a book that is “a straighforward, honest explanation of … the theory of quantum electron-dynamics — for a nontechnical audience. It is designed to give the interested reader an appreciation for the kind of thinking that physicists have resorted to in order to explain how Nature behaves.“[K: quantum electron-dynamics was the theory which Feynman later won his Nobel Prize on.] [Mar 6, 2012 update: Here is a link to a series of four QED lectures by Feynman in New Zealand, possibly quite close to what were transcribed into the book QED based on the Alix G. Mautner Memorial Lectures. [HT Peta Foster]]

‘I was Richard Feynman’s first student and he was my first teacher. We were brother and sister, the only children in our family. When I was a baby, Richard would bundle me into my carriage and take me over to his friend Bernie’s house. There he would prop me up so I could watch the two boys work with the batteries, wires, rheostats, switches, and radio tubes they had collected for their “laboratory”. He was nine.

I soon graduated to larger tasks. We had a dog, a fox terrier (more or less), the kind you could see in circuses back then. The family taught him tricks, like sitting and begging, by patiently getting him to understand what was expected and then giving him a treat when he was successful. The dog worked hard for the dog biscuits and amazed the neighborhood children. Observing this, Richard decided that I was probably trainable too, and the most amazing trick he could think of to teach me was to do arithmetic. The problem was, what to give me for a treat? Our mother was very careful with our diet and I certainly couldn’t have candy between meals. But he was always resourceful. When I got a problem correct I was allowed to pull his hair until it hurt or, to be more exact, until he grimaced as if in pain. I remember standing in my crib, maybe three years old, yanking on his hair with great delight while he excitedly planned to surprise Bernie with my new trick. I had just learned to add two and three. I have always believed that the reason Richard had a full head of hair all his life was because I had done such a good job of strengthening the roots.’

My latest addition is “Perfectly Reasonable Deviations From The Beaten Track: The Letters Of Richard P. Feynman“. This book is a collection of Dick’s correspondences as selected and edited by his daughter Michelle. After Dick won his Nobel Prize, he made time to visit students at his high school newspaper and gave an interview with the school newspaper. He told the school newspaper that when he was a student at Far Rockaway High School, he was “no good in English, no good in languages, impossibly poor in drawing, and a goody-good boy in school. I’ve changed.”[K: I just love the quote.]

I’ve also read Feynman’s Rainbow: A Search for Beauty in Physics and in Life and love it. I initially didn’t like this book when it was first published as I probably wanted more Feynman and less Leonard Mlodinow (the author). But I have learned to love it as I aged. The idea of young mind seeking advice from the old genius really appeals to me. PlusMlodinow went on to become a writer and scriptwriter for TV series including Star Trek: The Next Generation and MacGyver.

As an aside, I also love “Albert Einstein, The Human Side“, a book of letters selected by his secretary of 27 years. I quote a part of a letter by Einstein, “Your letter shows me also that wisdom is not a product of schooling but of the lifelong attempt to acquire it.”

As part of the research for this entry, I discovered, to my great pleasure (as I haven’t seen it before), the following 40 minutes documentary by Christopher Sykes about Dick. Here are a few brief comments,

The story and the lesson of the importance of “knowing something vs knowing their names” is just priceless.

Notice the respect and proud in Dick’s eyes when he talked about his dad.

Talks about learning Calculus at 13 by reading a book from the library!

The moment that Dick talked about he realized that he knew more about something than his father was quite a touching moment.

Dick’s discussion of whether his work deserves the Nobel Prize and his views on honour were truly priceless. The prize was finding the things out, the honours were the unreal things to Dick.

Unfortunately, Richard Feynman, as creative and ingenious as this man was, imho, must always contain a footnote (preferably in bold letters): one of the men who created the first atomic weapon.
-tgs-

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Hi Tommi,

You are right that Richard Feynman was on the team that created the atomic bomb. But I think we need to remember that the Germans were also working on the bomb at that time. Our world would have been very different if the Germans got there first and used it against the free world.

Cheers,
Kempton

P.S. Here is a story partially reflecting how Feynman felt about the bomb. Instead of re-typing similar passage from a different book, I am copying from this blogger’s text. This Feynman story is essentially the same as what I read in another book.

“After the thing {the atom bomb} went off and we heard about it, there was tremendous excitement at Los Alamos. Everybody had parties, we all ran around. I sat on the end of a jeep and beat drums and so on. Except for one man that I remember. [It] was Bob Wilson, who got me into it in the first place. He’s sitting there moping. I said, “What are you moping about?” He said, “It’s a terrible thing that we made.” I said, “But you started it, you got us into it.” You see, what happened to me, what happened to the rest of us is we started for a good reason but then we’re working very hard to do something, and to accomplish it, it’s pleasure, it’s excitement. And you stop to think, you know, you just stop. After you thought at the beginning, you just stop. So he was the only one who was still thinking about it, at that particular moment.

I returned to civilization shortly after that and went to Cornell to teach, and my first impression was a very strange one and I can’t understand it anymore but I felt very strongly then. I’d sat in a restaurant in New York, for example, and I looked out at the buildings and how far away, I would think, you know, how much the radius of the Hiroshima bomb damage was and so forth. How far down there was to 34th street? All those buildings, all smashed and so on. And I got a very strange feeling. I would go along and I would see people building a bridge. Or they’d be making a new road, and I thought, they’re crazy, they just don’t understand, they don’t understand. Why are they making new things, it’s so useless? But fortunately it’s been useless for 30 years now isn’t it, almost, maybe we’ll make 30 years. So I’ve been wrong for 30 years about its being useless making bridges and I’m glad that those other people were able to go ahead. But my first reaction after I was finished with this thing was it’s useless to make anything. Thank you very much.”